The growth of the Internet has created significant opportunities for electronic commerce. The primary business that drives growth in the Internet today is advertising. Web technology has made it possible to target advertising information to viewers with specific interests. What is missing is the ability for the service provider to efficiently bill the client for these dynamic opportunities to reach a potential customer.
Internet based advertising is currently billed in a fashion, which is similar to print, radio or television broadcast advertising. In this fashion, the billing is based on the availability of the advertisement to the viewer, and not on the actual number of viewers. Take television broadcast, for example, where billing is based largely on the rating of the program during which the advertisement is broadcast and the total time span of the advertising broadcast. Although the rating of the program correlates strongly with the number of viewers who are likely to view the program, it is derived from a survey prior to the actual broadcast of the program. While buying advertising time during a popular program could certainly help expose a product or service to a larger segment of the population than the potential viewers of a less popular program, the number of actual viewers cannot be precisely known. Likewise, in Internet based advertising, buying a segment of the web page on a popular portal is very likely to expose the product or service to more web surfers, but this exposure is estimated based on statistics and not actual numbers.
The current model for most Internet advertising consists of an agreement between a host web server and a client who has a product or service that he or she wishes to advertise. Typically, a fee is set based on the expected number of viewers, and the amount of screen space occupied by the message. This would be a fixed fee that is prepaid by the client. The difficulty with this arrangement is that the client has no reliable means of verifying that the host web server is meeting the server's part of the bargain. Certainly the client could check periodically to ensure the advertisement message appears, but the client has no method of knowing how many users see the advertisement. Any traffic logging information regarding the number of hits is controlled by the host web server. Accordingly, a dishonest host web server could overcharge the client by manipulating the traffic logging information.
Thus, it is advantageous and desirable to provide a method and system to accurately and securely track the distribution of digital information. This information may include advertisement distributed through the Internet. Once the distribution of Internet advertising can be accurately measured, alternative mechanisms of payment for Internet advertising will become possible. For example, instead of prepaying for advertising space over a period of time, a client could pay a small amount every time the advertisement appears.